We bought a house! A true fixer-upper that my husband assured me would only take a few months to make into our home. And after 6 months of camping out in the basement of my mom’s condo (Thanks Mom!); my husband, our kids and I moved into our half-finished home.
We love the house, the neighborhood and the community, but my dreams of decorating it with new furniture were dashed by the reality of the true cost of renovating.
So, I had to make do by decorating with our existing furniture, but find some creative ways to update our home’s 1960s split-level ranch style.
Easy, I’ll just get some new throw pillows.
I looked on-line, but who has time to view 5,000+ styles on some websites. I visited furniture stores, but they just wanted to sell me couches, not pillows. I walked through home good stores, but the pillows felt cheap and dirty from being handled multiple times. Finally I went to my brother’s upholstery shop and saw the beautiful designer fabrics that he uses for his clients in Greenwich, CT and Manhattan, NY.
I decided that I wanted a few styles of fabric, but realized that I didn’t need all the extra pillows. So he offered to make pillow cases to go over my existing pillows. He said that he could get me the cases in a month or two, and asked me what material I wanted for the pillow case backs. I asked him why would it take so long, and why not use the same material on both the front and the back. He said that his shop is busy, plus you only see the pillow fronts when they’re on the furniture, and that even his wealthiest clients don’t waste their money putting the luxury fabric on the back of a throw pillow. That way they get two luxury pillows from half the amount of fabric.
That’s when I thought what if you could simply change the front of a pillow without having to remove the pillow case from the pillow; so I could use multiple styles of fabric without having to make a pillow case for each fabric.
I took a piece of designer fabric and some VELCRO® style fasteners and asked my brother to sew half of it on the fabric “front”, then sew the other half on one of my pillow cases.
We attached the “velcroed” designer fabric front to the pillow case then removed it and reattached it a few times, and Pillow Style™ was born!
Pillow Style™ is a trademark of the Lacroix Trading Company, LLC
VELCRO® is a registered trademark of Velcro Industries B. V.